Just
when all my childhood dreams seemed to have come true, I nearly lost my mind
and then my life. I’ve never told this story publicly, but now it’s time.

It
was the beginning of 2011. I had just finished filming the first season of
“Game of Thrones,” a new HBO series based on George R. R. Martin’s “A Song of
Ice and Fire” novels. With almost no professional experience behind me, I’d
been given the role of Daenerys Targaryen, also known as Khaleesi of the Great
Grass Sea, Lady of Dragonstone, Breaker of Chains, Mother of Dragons. As a
young princess, Daenerys is sold in marriage to a musclebound Dothraki warlord
named Khal Drogo. It’s a long story—eight seasons long—but suffice to say that
she grows in stature and in strength. She becomes a figure of power and
self-possession. Before long, young girls would dress in platinum wigs and
flowing robes to be Daenerys Targaryen for Halloween.

The
show’s creators, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, have said that my character is
a blend of Napoleon, Joan of Arc, and Lawrence of Arabia. And yet, in the weeks
after we finished shooting the first season, despite all the looming excitement
of a publicity campaign and the series première, I hardly felt like a
conquering spirit. I was terrified. Terrified of the attention, terrified of a
business I barely understood, terrified of trying to make good on the faith
that the creators of “Thrones” had put in me. I felt, in every way, exposed. In
the very first episode, I appeared naked, and, from that first press junket
onward, I always got the same question: some variation of “You play such a
strong woman, and yet you take off your clothes. Why?” In my head, I’d respond,
“How many men do I need to kill to prove myself?”

To
relieve the stress, I worked out with a trainer. I was a television actor now,
after all, and that is what television actors do. We work out. On the morning
of February 11, 2011, I was getting dressed in the locker room of a gym in
Crouch End, North London, when I started to feel a bad headache coming on. I
was so fatigued that I could barely put on my sneakers. When I started my
workout, I had to force myself through the first few exercises.

Then
my trainer had me get into the plank position, and I immediately felt as though
an elastic band were squeezing my brain. I tried to ignore the pain and push
through it, but I just couldn’t. I told my trainer I had to take a break.
Somehow, almost crawling, I made it to the locker room. I reached the toilet,
sank to my knees, and proceeded to be violently, voluminously ill. Meanwhile,
the pain—shooting, stabbing, constricting pain—was getting worse. At some
level, I knew what was happening: my brain was damaged.

For
a few moments, I tried to will away the pain and the nausea. I said to myself,
“I will not be paralyzed.” I moved my fingers and toes to make sure that was
true. To keep my memory alive, I tried to recall, among other things, some
lines from “Game of Thrones.”

I
heard a woman’s voice coming from the next stall, asking me if I was O.K. No, I
wasn’t. She came to help me and maneuvered me onto my side, in the recovery
position. Then everything became, at once, noisy and blurry. I remember the
sound of a siren, an ambulance; I heard new voices, someone saying that my
pulse was weak. I was throwing up bile. Someone found my phone and called my
parents, who live in Oxfordshire, and they were told to meet me at the
emergency room of Whittington Hospital.

A
fog of unconsciousness settled over me. From an ambulance, I was wheeled on a
gurney into a corridor filled with the smell of disinfectant and the noises of
people in distress. Because no one knew what was wrong with me, the doctors and
nurses could not give me any drugs to ease the pain.

Finally,
I was sent for an MRI, a brain scan. The diagnosis was quick and ominous: a
subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), a life-threatening type of stroke, caused by
bleeding into the space surrounding the brain. I’d had an aneurysm, an arterial
rupture. As I later learned, about a third of SAH patients die immediately or soon
thereafter. For the patients who do survive, urgent treatment is required to
seal off the aneurysm, as there is a very high risk of a second, often fatal
bleed. If I was to live and avoid terrible deficits, I would have to have
urgent surgery. And, even then, there were no guarantees.

I
was taken by ambulance to the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery,
a beautiful redbrick Victorian pile in central London. It was nighttime. My mum
slept in my hospital ward, slumped in a chair, as I kept falling in and out of
sleep, in a state of drugged wooziness, shooting pain, and persistent
nightmares.

I
remember being told that I should sign a release form for surgery. Brain
surgery? I was in the middle of my very busy life—I had no time for brain surgery.
But, finally, I settled down and signed. And then I was unconscious. For the
next three hours, surgeons went about repairing my brain. This would not be my
last surgery, and it would not be the worst. I was twenty-four years old..

Prefer Video version of Emilia's Story...

I grew up in Oxford and rarely gave a thought to my health. Nearly all I thought about was acting. My dad was a sound designer. He worked on productions of “West Side Story” and “Chicago” in the West End. My mother was, and is, a businesswoman, the vice-president of marketing for a global management consultancy. We weren’t wealthy, but my brother and I went to private schools. Our parents, who wanted everything for us, struggled to keep up with the fees.

In the spring of 2010, my agent called to say that auditions were being held in London for a new HBO series. The pilot for “Game of Thrones” had been flawed and they wanted to re-cast, among other roles, Daenerys. The part called for an otherworldly, bleached-blond woman of mystery. I’m a short, dark-haired, curvy Brit. Whatever. To prepare, I learned these very strange lines for two scenes, one in Episode 4, in which my brother goes to hit me, and one in Episode 10, in which I walk into a fire and survive, unscathed.

In those days, I thought of myself as healthy. Sometimes I got a little light-headed, because I often had low blood pressure and a low heart rate. Once in a while, I’d get dizzy and pass out. When I was fourteen, I had a migraine that kept me in bed for a couple of days, and in drama school I’d collapse once in a while. But it all seemed manageable, part of the stress of being an actor and of life in general. Now I think that I might have been experiencing warning signs of what was to come.

That first surgery was what is known as “minimally invasive,” meaning that they did not open up my skull. Rather, using a technique called endovascular coiling, the surgeon introduced a wire into one of the femoral arteries, in the groin; the wire made its way north, around the heart, and to the brain, where they sealed off the aneurysm.

The operation lasted three hours. When I woke, the pain was unbearable. I had no idea where I was. My field of vision was constricted. There was a tube down my throat and I was parched and nauseated. They moved me out of the I.C.U. after four days and told me that the great hurdle was to make it to the two-week mark. If I made it that long with minimal complications, my chances of a good recovery were high.

One night, after I’d passed that crucial mark, a nurse woke me and, as part of a series of cognitive exercises, she said, “What’s your name?” My full name is Emilia Isobel Euphemia Rose Clarke. But now I couldn’t remember it. Instead, nonsense words tumbled out of my mouth and I went into a blind panic. Cont'd at Right...

I’d never
experienced fear like that—a sense of doom closing in. I could see my life
ahead, and it wasn’t worth living. I am an actor; I need to remember my lines.
Now I couldn’t recall my name.

I
was suffering from a condition called aphasia, a consequence of the trauma my
brain had suffered. Even as I was muttering nonsense, my mum did me the great
kindness of ignoring it and trying to convince me that I was perfectly lucid.
But I knew I was faltering. In my worst moments, I wanted to pull the plug. I
asked the medical staff to let me die. My job—my entire dream of what my life
would be—centered on language, on communication. Without that, I was lost.

I
was sent back to the I.C.U. and, after about a week, the aphasia passed. I was
able to speak. I knew my name—all five bits. But I was also aware that there
were people in the beds around me who didn’t make it out of the I.C.U. I was
continually reminded of just how fortunate I was. One month after being
admitted, I left the hospital, longing for a bath and fresh air. I had press
interviews to do and, in a matter of weeks, I was scheduled to be back on the
set of “Game of Thrones.”

I
went back to my life, but, while I was in the hospital, I was told that I had a
smaller aneurysm on the other side of my brain, and it could “pop” at any time.
The doctors said, though, that it was small and it was possible it would remain
dormant and harmless indefinitely. We would just keep a careful watch. And
recovery was hardly instant. There was still the pain to deal with, and
morphine to keep it at bay. I told my bosses at “Thrones” about my condition,
but I didn’t want it to be a subject of public discussion and dissection. The
show must go on!

Even
before we began filming Season 2, I was deeply unsure of myself. I was often so
woozy, so weak, that I thought I was going to die. Staying at a hotel in London
during a publicity tour, I vividly remember thinking, I can’t keep up or think
or breathe, much less try to be charming. I sipped on morphine in between
interviews. The pain was there, and the fatigue was like the worst exhaustion
I’d ever experienced, multiplied by a million. And, let’s face it, I’m an
actor. Vanity comes with the job. I spent way too much time thinking about how
I looked. If all this weren’t enough, I seemed to whack my head every time I
tried to get in a taxi.

On
the first day of shooting for Season 2, in Dubrovnik, I kept telling myself, “I
am fine, I’m in my twenties, I’m fine.” I threw myself into the work. But,
after that first day of filming, I barely made it back to the hotel before I
collapsed of exhaustion.

On
the set, I didn’t miss a beat, but I struggled. Season 2 would be my worst. I
didn’t know what Daenerys was doing. If I am truly being honest, every minute
of every day I thought I was going to die.

In
2013, after finishing Season 3, I took a job on Broadway, playing Holly
Golightly.

While
I was still in New York for the play, with five days left on my SAG insurance,
I went in for a brain scan—something I now had to do regularly. The growth on
the other side of my brain had doubled in size, and the doctor said we should
“take care of it.” I was promised a relatively simple operation, easier than
last time. Not long after, I found myself in a fancy-pants private room at a
Manhattan hospital. My parents were there. “See you in two hours,” my mum said,
and off I went for surgery, another trip up the femoral artery to my brain. No
problem.

Except
there was. When they woke me, I was screaming in pain. The procedure had
failed. I had a massive bleed and the doctors made it plain that my chances of
surviving were precarious if they didn’t operate again. This time they needed
to access my brain in the old-fashioned way—through my skull. And the operation
had to happen immediately.

The
recovery was even more painful than it had been after the first surgery. I
looked as though I had been through a war more gruesome than any that Daenerys
experienced. I emerged from the operation with a drain coming out of my head.
Bits of my skull had been replaced by titanium. These days, you can’t see the
scar that curves from my scalp to my ear, but I didn’t know at first that it
wouldn’t be visible. And there was, above all, the constant worry about
cognitive or sensory losses. Would it be concentration? Memory? Peripheral
vision? Now I tell people that what it robbed me of is good taste in men. But,
of course, none of this seemed remotely funny at the time.

I
spent a month in the hospital again and, at certain points, I lost all hope. I
couldn’t look anyone in the eye. There was terrible anxiety, panic attacks. I
was raised never to say, “It’s not fair”; I was taught to remember that there
is always someone who is worse off than you. But, going through this experience
for the second time, all hope receded. I felt like a shell of myself. So much
so that I now have a hard time remembering those dark days in much detail. My
mind has blocked them out. But I do remember being convinced that I wasn’t
going to live. And, what’s more, I was sure that the news of my illness would
get out. And it did—for a fleeting moment. Six weeks after the surgery, the
National Enquirer ran a short story. A reporter asked me about it and I denied
it.

But
now, after keeping quiet all these years, I’m telling you the truth in full.
Please believe me: I know that I am hardly unique, hardly alone. Countless
people have suffered far worse, and with nothing like the care I was so lucky
to receive.

A
few weeks after that second surgery, I went with a few other cast members to
Comic-Con, in San Diego. The fans at Comic-Con are hardcore; you don’t want to
disappoint them. There were several thousand people in the audience, and, right
before we went on to answer questions, I was hit by a horrific headache. Back
came that sickeningly familiar sense of fear. I thought, This is it. My time is
up; I’ve cheated death twice and now he’s coming to claim me. As I stepped
offstage, my publicist looked at me and asked what was wrong. I told her, but
she said that a reporter from MTV was waiting for an interview. I figured, if
I’m going to go, it might as well be on live television.

But
I survived. I survived MTV and so much more. In the years since my second
surgery I have healed beyond my most unreasonable hopes. I am now at a hundred
per cent. Beyond my work as an actor, I’ve decided to throw myself into a
charity I’ve helped develop in conjunction with partners in the U.K. and the U.S.
It is called SameYou, and it aims to provide treatment for people recovering
from brain injuries and stroke. I feel endless gratitude—to my mum and brother,
to my doctors and nurses, to my friends. Every day, I miss my father, who died
of cancer in 2016, and I can never thank him enough for holding my hand to the
very end.

There
is something gratifying, and beyond lucky, about coming to the end of
“Thrones.” I’m so happy to be here to see the end of this story and the
beginning of whatever comes next.